Paul and Lucy Spadoni periodically live in Tuscany to explore Paul’s Italian roots, practice their Italian and enjoy “la dolce vita.”
All work is copyrighted and may not be reprinted without written permission from the author, who can be contacted at www.paulspadoni.com

Tuesday, May 5, 2015

Origins of the Esveldt family in Eastern Washington, as told by Jeannette Esveldt, my grandmother

While I have regrets that
I didn’t ask more questions of my uncles, aunts, cousins and
parents before they passed on, I did one thing right. I
interviewed my grandmother in 1977 about her life, and later I recorded and
transcribed the results.

Jeannette Esveldt was born Aug. 14,
1892, in Spokane, Washington to Jan Pieter Esveldt and Hendrina
(Henrietta) Munnik. Her five older siblings were born in Uithoorn in
North Holland, where her father operated an ironworks business that
manufactured parts for ships.

“It was during the
great, almost worldwide, depression, the early 1890s,” she said.
“So Dad’s company had suffered very much because there were
people that couldn’t pay him, the ones that he worked for.

“His brother George had
come over ahead of him as just a kid of 18. And George wrote and said
there were more opportunities here in this country and would be in
the future. Dad had three boys already, and so there would be more
opportunities for them.”

The family departed from
Rotterdam and arrived in New York on May 31, 1892. Henrietta had five
children—Cornelia, Maartje, Pieter Jan, Jan Pieter and Gerardus
“George”—aboard to look after, and another, my grandmother,
well on the way. After her birth came four more—Henrietta Marie
“Mae”, Fred, Harold and Virgil.

As for the five born in
Holland, Jeannette said, “The folks insisted on their learning
English as fast as they could. When that is done, they don’t have
any accent because they were still young. The oldest one was 10. And
they had absolutely not a trace of accent of any kind.”

Her parents could not
escape having a Dutch accent. “Of course, Dad had had English in
high school,” Jeannette said. “He could speak French and English
and Dutch. Mother hadn’t, so she had to teach herself. She just
began with the primer and taught herself.

“When Dad came over
here, there were no ships to build, so he was just a blacksmith. But
they were especially fine people. They were real aristocrats, is what
they were, though they didn’t belong to the aristocratic caste in
Holland.”

When Jan Pieter left
Holland, he bade his mother, Neeltje Blom, good-bye, but he had no
other immediate family except aunts and uncles left to see him off.

“His mother was the only
one that was living,” Jeannette said. “He had no other relatives
then. He was from a family of 10 children. Most of them had died from
diphtheria. In those days, when diphtheria struck a town, it’d just
wipe the kids out like . . . just like mowing hay, and so she had
lost a lot of her children, and so when he left, why, there were no
children of her still living (in Holland). The only ones that were
living were John and George, that came over. So she came out, too,
soon after.”

She lived with George, who
was a bachelor; he never did marry, so she lived with him. But she
died very soon; she wasn’t here but just a very short time . . .
and strangely enough, I was a darned homely little kid, but I was her
favorite. And I can remember going up to her house, and she’d seat
me on a big chair that had a book on it so I could reach, and she’d
butter up and sugar up a slice of bread and cut it in little squares.
I was only three when she died, but I still remember her quite
vividly.

Neeltje Blom died in
Dartford, near Spokane, in 1896, at age 69.

“I was only two when
they left Spokane; they came out to Dartford, and George, who was
working with Dad, the two of them built a house and a blacksmith
shop,” Jeannette said. “They went to blacksmithing for the
farmers that came through town, and they’d shoe horses. And Dad was
quite inventive. He invented quite a number of things, but he wasn’t
familiar enough with what you had to do if you needed a patent, so he
never made any money out of his inventions, but he did invent three
or four things.

“We lived in Dartford
until I was 17, and during that time Mother died, and we had just a
streak of terrible luck, and poor Dad was just about to give up, I
guess. Anyway, then we moved up to Cheweleh to a farm, and Dad, never
having been a farmer, wasn’t very successful at that either.”

Starting a farm proved
difficult, but through hard work and persistence, it paid off. “I
don’t think we ever really went hungry, not even when we first
came to Spokane in the depression . . . oh, they didn’t call them
depressions then, they called them panics,” Jeannette said. “It
was on, and it was hard to get work, but dad and uncle George managed
some way. Of course, they had money from Holland, too, for that
matter. Dad had sold his business, you know, so I suppose the first
few years they probably lived on that. I don’t know. But when they
got out to Dartford, usually they’d try to pay in money, but if
they couldn’t do that, they paid in produce. That’s what people
did in those days.”

The bad luck she spoke of
consisted mainly of deaths and illnesses.

“Well, mother died
(1906),” she said, “and Nell, the oldest one of the girls, she
was married and had one little boy, and her husband at the time was
living with us. Mother was sick then, and Harry, Nell’s husband,
went over to the sawmill one morning before anyone else was there,
and he was trying to do something he shouldn’t have tried to do,
something beyond his strength, and a log rolled over and killed him
(1908).

“And George, who was
about 16, he had pneumonia, and he had to be operated on. And Margie,
the second girl from the top, had what we now would call rheumatoid
arthritis. And Mae, who was next younger to me, had a virus that they
called in those days St. Vitus Dance, but it’s only a virus, and
she was sick all one winter. So all of that just within a couple of
years, so Dad was just devastated.”

The farm had been owned by
Jan Pieter’s brother George. “Dad bought it from him, and we had
a rather hard time up there for the first year or so,” Jeannette
said. “And up there, Dad raised strawberries and we picked
strawberries and Fred would take them downtown and sell them. They
did quite a bit of selling wood.”

A large family from
Indiana moved to town in 1910, and their coming had a significant
influence on several members of the Esveldt family. The Wagoner
sisters inspired Jeannette and her sister Mae to become teachers, and
two of the brothers married Esveldts—including my grandfather John
Ernest Wagoner, who married Jeannette in 1918.

5 comments:

Oh my gosh, I was so excited to read your posts! My grandmother was Jeannette's sister Mae (Esveldt Maddox)! From what I heard from my father, they were very close. Mae was a teacher, too. I knew some of the family details you relate, but would love to read more if you have them. My dad, Mae's son, is turning 96 next week. He grew up in Kettle Falls, WA, but moved to Michigan as a young man and still lives there, as do I.

Wow, it's great to hear from you, Jane. Aunt Mae and Jeannette were very close throughout their lives. Mae even came to live with Jeannette for awhile later in their lives, and that was right next door to me. Wonderful, sweet women, both of them. There was a home-made book on the Esveldt family history printed some years ago. Have you seen it? Other than that, I don't have any other information to give you.

Thanks for responding! I have seen the Esveldt book - Dad has a copy. I didn't mention it because I couldn't remember which Esveldt had written it, but now I want to read through it again. I am visiting my dad this weekend, so will be sure to pick it up. I really enjoyed looking at the pictures of Uithoorn and Mijdrecht on your other post and will have to show them to Dad this weekend. He has been to the Netherlands several times, but I'm not sure that he made it there, specifically (I have not travelled there, yet, but hope to). Thanks again!

Thanks for responding! I have seen the Esveldt book - Dad has a copy. I didn't mention it because I couldn't remember which Esveldt had written it, but now I want to read through it again. I am visiting my dad this weekend, so will be sure to pick it up. I really enjoyed looking at the pictures of Uithoorn and Mijdrecht on your other post and will have to show them to Dad this weekend. He has been to the Netherlands several times, but I'm not sure that he made it there, specifically (I have not travelled there, yet, but hope to). Thanks again!

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First off, before you hassle me about our title, Lucy thought of it. Yes, I know some people may think broad is derogatory, but the etymology is uncertain and she doesn’t find it offensive, and it made me laugh. We have been married since 1974 and are empty-nesters now, which allows me to bring my submerged Italophilia into the open. We first came to live in Italy from February-April in 2011 and have returned during the same months every year. From 2011-2015, we lived in San Salvatore, at the foot of the hilltop city Montecarlo, where my paternal grandparents were born, raised and, in 1908, married. In late 2015, we bought a home in Montecarlo. We come for a variety of purposes: We want to re-establish contact with distant cousins in both Nonno’s and Nonna’s families, we want to learn the language and see what it is like to live as Italians in modern Italy, we like to travel and experience different cultures. Even if we aren’t successful at achieving these purposes, we love Italy and enjoy every moment here, so there is no chance we will be disappointed. I am grateful to God for giving me a wife who is beautiful, clever, adaptable and willing to jump into my dreams wholeheartedly.